MAN IN BED

Jaden Cruz

The Man in the Bed abruptly woke up in a room with no memory of what existed in the past or future of this moment. For all he knew, none of it existed at all. Each attempt to grasp at the past slipped through his fingers and he struggled to recollect it. He was a man dying of thirst, but the water he sought would leak through his hands before it could reach his mouth. Looking out at the unfamiliar room before him, he struggled to find the names of the objects in the room. It was much easier to write them off as oblong shapes, but he found himself attempting to find their names anyway—despite its futility, which even he was aware of.

The whole ordeal was making his eyes hurt. They were tired and wanted only rest. So, in order to appease their earnest protest, the man turned away from the room and the questions it asked of him. He was now faced with a cool blank wall that stood to his immediate left, and allowed his eyelids the peaceful indifference they pleaded for. He spent a few moments studying the wall, almost as if it was a piece of scripture. In fact, one could argue the calmness and serenity offered to his suffering eyelids was comparable to divine salvation

or something of that sort. If you asked him in that moment, the man would probably go as far as to say this wall was his savior, and his God. It was all he knew, and it had saved him from the chaos, and offered him an oasis in the desert he currently found himself in.

However, within seconds of meeting that which his poor eyelids cried for, he heard a new cry of agony. His limbs could not stand the weight his body forced onto them, for even the slightest pressure would produce pain, as if all the life was being squeezed and crushed right out of them. In order to combat this, The Man in the Bed squirmed vehemently, like a worm left out on the sidewalk after a day of rain, delegating minimal amounts of pressure onto each of his limbs. The unrelenting movement created by his constant wriggling under the weight of his body proved to be too much for his helpless eyelids, who were now jostled into an employment they objected to. At this point, he had no choice but to wake up, no matter how heavy his eyelids felt. The rest his tired eyes desired was a small casualty when put into comparison with the rest of his aching body. He lay there for a moment with a groggy sense of dread. Confused and frightened, he felt as if a thick mist obscured every message being sent from his body to his brain. He rolled over to his back.

Staring at the ceiling above him, he thought of the few differences between ceilings: they are often white; some may have bumps, while others may be smooth. This would all be irrelevant to most people when looking at a ceiling. He spent some time allowing his eyes to leisurely pass over the ceiling’s breadth, and noted its relative stability and sameness, not at all aware of his own redundancy. He found this extremely soothing, and was intrigued, almost seduced, by the natural charisma inherent in the ceiling he currently studied. He began trying to think of every ceiling he had ever known—and took enormous amounts of pleasure at the prospect of doing so—but was once again faced with the complete and total

lack of anything substantive in his head. The inkling of self awareness this garnered gave way to vexation and fury. Where was he? Why was he here? To these questions he hadn’t the slightest answer, which only served to frustrate him more. It was out of this anger that he pushed himself over once more to face the bedroom, which had ruined his otherwise peaceful sleep—if not out of curiosity, then out of wrath and a peculiar sense of justice to avenge the rest which his eyelids had been deprived of.

The Man in the Bed was greeted coldly by the room, expressionless and plain, livened only by a small wooden desk with two adjacent wooden chairs in the far corner of the gray square which made up his new abode. The room was also complete with a domed ceiling light, which until now he had not realized was there. It lit up the room with a weak yellow glow, which struggled to light the farthest reaches of the tiny domicile, instead leaving shadows that made the room feel boundless and eternal.

He found this unsettling, and decided to focus his attention on the ceiling light and the questions he had regarding it instead. His newly awakened eyes placed what attention they could muster on the small dome that made up the only light in the windowless room, and quickly began to obsess over the light and the obvious implications he felt he was being beaten over the head with.

To him the fixture resembled the breast of the Madonna, only rather than nourishing him with the strength needed to take his first steps, the light drained him further. It made him feel as if he were a small child, red-faced and crying with all its might, whose helplessness and inability to act on the rage they felt could only give way to tears and pathetic ploys for attention. After all, was he any different than a child? He had been lying shackled to his bed for what felt like hours, was still, even in this moment of self realization, unable to escape his crib, and had until this point only managed to substitute action with pointless thoughts concerning ceilings and his own discomfort.

Within moments, he was awash with hopeless despair and shame as the vindictive light shriveled his entire being into nothingness. Each beam seemed to violently strangle his identity with an iron grip made up of every rejection he had been subjected to, and

strengthened by every shortcoming and failure that had been born out of his weakness, stupidity, and lack of moral fiber.

Yet how could he look away? Every moment spent hiding from the light was a moment of inconsolable guilt. The poor light’s only course of action was to provide him with that which was essential to his being and allow him to navigate through the darkness, which would be all-encompassing if not for the light’s existence. By ignoring the ceiling light, he would be depriving it of its sole purpose: to cover him in a warm glow, and gently nurture him into wakefulness. To him there was no greater crime than preventing one from acting on their natural urges; by rejecting the bosom of light above him, he was committing sacrilege against everything he believed in.

Despite this, he knew the truth. He knew the light was failing him, that its attempt to cover him in a maternal glow failed miserably. Subjecting himself to a heinous manipulation of affection such as this would be just as bad as the guilt he felt ignoring it. Robbed of his free will, his only choice was to remain in limbo between each of his options: guilt or suffering. Simultaneously, he felt the invisible eyes of an unknown audience, watching him with both contempt and voyeurism in the shadows of the room created by the yellow light. He knew their thoughts, and the disgust they had for him, his ungratefulness, and his lack of sensitivity and understanding for the ceiling light. He heard them laughing at him, felt their sneers, but knew he was in no place to defend himself. His struggle was pathetic, and had he been a member of that shadowed audience he would laugh the loudest of them all. He thought to himself: imagine a man’s biggest struggle being to accept a love he felt to be unjust, or to deal with the guilt that overwhelmed him from neglecting it. It made him feel small and with that The Man in the Bed slowly began to shrink into himself.

He allowed his limbs and heavy head to weakly curl into his torso, once again reverting to the familiarity of the fetal position; but the pain was inescapable. He softly began to sob, sob until he felt himself at the point of complete exhaustion, until death seemed to be the next logical step in this tortuous journey he had begun only moments ago. It was at this point, when his cries reached a high resounding peak, and his body was at the point of

complete exhaustion, that he felt he could not go on for one more second on this pedestal he had been placed onto. He reached catharsis.

Quickly, with concise movements born out of his physicality, he leaped out of the bed with the swiftness of an animal fulfilling its inherent primal desires, and made his way towards the wooden chair in the corner of the room. Without thinking, he smashed the chair into the breast of light above him, and allowed the cascading shards of crystalline glass to fall onto his naked body. With that, all the strength he had recently acquired was expelled through his pores, and he fell, nearly lifeless, into the pile of glass that surrounded his feet. He lay there in a pool of his own blood and semen that twinkled with shattered glass, allowing himself to be gently cradled to sleep by the cool darkness and isolation of his room.